1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for failover of blade servers in a data center.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Blade computers are increasingly being used to run critical applications that require a high level of redundancy and fault tolerance. Various clustering solutions exist such as VMware's high availability and Microsoft's clustering technology, but these systems are often complex and high priced. To provide redundancy and fault tolerance, data used by blade computers is stored remotely with respect to the blade. The remote storage is typically administered through a third party proxy by use of storage and network addresses of blade servers. Such storage and network addresses include for example, WWN or MAC address. A World Wide Name (‘WWN’) or World Wide Identifier (‘WWID’) is a unique identifier in a Fibre Channel or Serial Attached SCSI storage network, and a Media Access Control address (‘MAC address’), Ethernet Hardware Address (‘EHA’), hardware address, or adapter address is a quasi-unique identifier attached to most network adapters in blade computers. When a blade computer fails and is replaced, however, a manual and complex process is required to replace the failed blade with a new blade so that the new blade is capable of accessing the same remote storage. There is currently no automatic process for replacing a failed blade computer having remote storage with another blade computer that does not require the use of the remote third party proxy that manages the remote storage.